The water works

Emil L. Doctorow became internationally known for his fourth novel "Ragtime" (1975), after which three more books were published—two novels ("Loonlake", 1980, and "The World's Fair", 1985) and a volume containing a novel and six stories — "Lives of the Poets" (1984), one of which follows.

I had followed my man here. Everything he did was mysterious to me, and his predilection for the Water Works this November day was no less so. A square, granite building, with crenelated turrets at the corners, it stood hard by the reservoir on a high plain overlooking the city from the north. There was an abundance of windows through which, however, no light seemed to pass. I saw reflected the sky behind me, a tumultuous thing of billowing shapes of gray tumbling through vaults of pink sunset and with black rain clouds sailing overhead like an armada.

His carriage was in the front yard. His horse pawed the stony ground and swung its head about to look at me.

The reservoir behind the building, five or six city blocks in area, was cratered in an embankment that went up from the ground at an angle suggesting the pyramidal platform of an ancient civilization, Mayan perhaps. On Sundays in warm weather, people came here from the city and climbed the embankment, calling out to one another as they rose to the sight of a squared expanse of water. This day it was his alone. I heard the violent chop, the insistent slap of the tides against the cobblestone.

He stood a ways out in the darkening day; he was studying something upon the water, my black-bearded captain. He held his hat brim. The corner of his long coat took the wind and pressed against his leg.

I was sure he knew of my presence. Indeed, for some days I had sensed from his actions a mad presumption of partnership, as if he engaged in his enterprises for our mutual benefit. I climbed the embankment a hundred or so yards to his east and faced into the wind to see the object of his attention.

It was a toy boat under sail, rising and falling in heavy swells at alarming heel, disappearing and then reappearing all atumble, water pouring off her sides.

We watched her for several minutes. She disappeared and rose and again disappeared. There was a rhythm in this to lull the perception, and some moments passed before I realized, waiting for her rising, that I waited in vain. I was as struck in the chest with the catastrophe as if I had stood on some cliff and watched the sea take a sailing vessel.

When I thought to look for my man, he was running across the wide moat of hardened earth that led to the rear gates of the Water Works. I followed. Inside the building I felt the chill of entombed air and I heard the orchestra of water hissing and roaring in its fall. I ran down a stone corridor and found another that offered passage to the left or right. I listened. I heard his steps clearly, a metallic rap of heels echoing from my right. At the end of the dark conduit was a flight of iron stairs rising circularly about a black steel gear shaft. Around I went, rising, and reaching the top story, I found the view opening out from a catwalk over a vast inner pool of roiling water. This hellish churn pounded up a mineral mist, like a fifth element, in whose sustenance there grew on the blackened stone face of the far wall a profusion of moss and slime.

Above me was a skylight of translucent glass. By its dim light I discovered him not five feet from where I stood. He was bent over the rail with a rapt expression of the most awful intensity. I thought he would topple, so unaware of himself did he seem in that moment. I found the sight of him in his passion almost unendurable. So again I looked at what he was seeing, and there below, in the yellowing rush of spumed currents and water plunging into its mechanical harness, a small human body was pressed against the machinery of one of the sluicegates, its clothing caught as in some hinge, and the child, for it was a miniature like the ship in the reser­voir, went slamming about, first one way and then the next, as if in mute protest, trembling and shaking and animating by its revulsion the death that had already overtaken it. Someone shouted, and after a moment I saw, as if they had separated from the stone, three uniformed men poised on a lower ledge. They were well apprised of the situation. They were heaving on a line strung from a pulley fixed in the far wall, and by this means advancing a towline attached to the wall below my catwalk where I could not see. But now into view he came, another of the water workers, suspended from a sling by the ankles, his hands outstretched as he waited to be aligned so that he could free the flow of this obstruction.

And then he had him, raised from the water by his shirt, an urchin, anywhere from four to eight I would have said, drowned blue, and then by the ankles and shoes; and so suspended, both, they swung back across the pouring currents rhythmically, like performing aerialists, till they were out of sight below me.

I wondered, perhaps from the practiced quality of their maneuver, if the water workers were not accustomed to such impediments. A few minutes later, in the yard under the darkened sky, I watched my man load the wrapped corpse into his carriage, shut the door smartly, and leap then to the high seat, where he commanded his horse with a great rolling snap of the reins. And off it went, the bright black wheel spokes brought to a blur as the dead child was raced to the city.

The rain had begun. I went back in and felt the oppression of a universe of water, inside and out, over the dead and the living.

The water workers were dividing some treasure among them­selves. They wore the dark-blue'uniform with the high collar of the city employee, but amended with rough sweaters under the tunics and with trousers tucked into their high boots. It was not an enviable employment here. I could imagine in human lungs the same flora that grew on stone. Their faces were bright and flushed, their blood urged to the skin by the chill and their skin brought to a high glaze by the mist.

They saw me and made a great show of not caring. They broke out the whiskey for their tin cups. There is such a cherishing of ritual too among firemen and gravediggers.

* * *

The anonymity of the narrator and the protagonist, who are hidden by the all-embracing pronoun and the wide semantics of "the man", is unveiled by certain indications of their identity in the text. The description of the man's actions (see the paragraph close to the end "1 wondered, perhaps...") allows to name his job. What is it?

Proceeding from the kind of work the man has been doing, what can you say about the narrator who says "my man" (see the opening sentence and the paragraph indicated above) and on whose presence the strange reaction of the workers is shown in the last three phrases? Who is it that retells the story in the first person singular?

John Cheever (1912—1982)